In Major League Baseball's compact postseason, heroics are instantly hallowed and mistakes are immediately magnified. That applies not only to the players who hit clutch home runs or commit embarrassing errors, but also to the fans who channel their inner Bartman and — sometimes most publicly — the umpires who preside over it all.
This year's Division Series were no different from any other. They featured lots of timely hitting and an abundance of costly blunders. Fans of the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Philadelphia Phillies are now celebrating and preparing for the championship series, while supporters of the Minnesota Twins, Boston Red Sox, St. Louis Cardinals, and Colorado Rockies can only count down the days until spring training, 2010. And yet, it is four of baseball's men in black who are dreading the offseason most.
Sports fans often say that if the name of an umpire or referee sounds familiar, it usually means that they don't call a particularly good game. And now, the names C.B. Bucknor, Phil Cuzzi, Jerry Meals and Ron Kulpa will live on in MLB postseason infamy.
Red Sox fans were left to feel that Bucknor had an undue impact on their losses to the Angels in Games One and Three. The umpire missed a bevy of calls at first base in the series opener and then submitted Boston's batters to a seemingly trapezoidal strike zone the following night.
Twins fans, meanwhile, are still reeling from a call by left-field umpire Cuzzi in their Game Two defeat, when the veteran arbiter ruled what should have been a double by Joe Mauer a foul ball — even though it tipped off outfielder Melky Cabrera's glove and landed inside the line. They're convinced that Cuzzi's New York roots cost them a chance to pull off a riveting upset.
The Coors Field faithful who braved near-freezing temperatures are wishing the worst case of frostbite on Meals and Kulpa for wrongly awarding the Phillies' Chase Utley an infield single that set up Ryan Howard's game-winning sacrifice fly in Game Three.
On that play, the ball nicked Utley's knee while he was still in the batter's box and therefore should have been called foul. While some argue that the home-plate umpire Meals didn't have any way of seeing this, Rockies fans will retort that Utley took an illegal route to first base to block Huston Street's throwing lane, which should've resulted in an automatic out. And if the dimensions of the baseline are a judgment call that is too questionable to fight, Colorado supporters will provide evidence that the throw beat Utley to first base and that Todd Helton kept his foot on the bag long enough to retire the batter.
All of those claims are indisputably valid. The calls were botched, and the decisions certainly had some negative probabilistic impact on the teams' chances of winning the games at hand. But sometimes, it's far more important to see the forest than the trees.
The calls that went against the Red Sox in Game One would have mattered little if Jon Lester hadn't served up a fat cutter to Torii Hunter, or if Boston's offense had shown any signs of life. Likewise, Bucknor's strike zone in Game Two was consistently inconsistent — it may have been trapezoidal, hexagonal or round, but it was the same for both teams.
The Twins weren't all that maligned by Cuzzi's decision to take away Mauer's leadoff double because the likely AL MVP singled later in the at-bat. In fact, Minnesota ended up with the bases loaded and nobody out in the inning but still failed to score. What actually cost Ron Gardenhire's squad the game was its inability to implement the same situational baseball skills that carried the team into the postseason in the first place.
And while the Rockies might have gained a more favorable result in Game Three had Meals and Kulpa umpired it flawlessly, even manager Jim Tracy said that didn't pull the plug on the amplifier for Rocktober. The real culprit, according to the skipper? Eight walks issued by Colorado pitching in that contest, and an abysmal 2-for-9 effort with runners in scoring position.
The Angels out-hit, out-pitched and out-defended the Red Sox. The Twins made crucial baserunning mistakes that the Yankees took advantage of, and they simply couldn't match New York's firepower. The Rockies were tamed by pitcher Cliff Lee and had trouble producing hits in key situations throughout the series. Thus, those three teams, plus the Cardinals — who saw their bats go cold, Matt Holliday's glove become wooden and pitchers Chris Carpenter and Ryan Franklin implode against the Dodgers — will be watching the rest of the postseason from home.
So, too, will Bucknor, Cuzzi, Meals and Kulpa, unless their regular-season performance merits an appointment to the League Championship or World Series crews. No one feels worse about the officiating mistakes that were made last week than the four umpires involved. Just as no one feels worse than Nick Punto about his awful baserunning, or Jonathan Papelbon about the fastball that Vladimir Guerrero deposited into centerfield.
The players who themselves made errors should have no problem finding motivation for improvement. Meanwhile, the fans that had their weekends marred by the blown calls would be better served pondering what their teams did wrong and how they can better prepare for another run at the pennant next fall.
